A panel discussion on CNN got heated Sunday when former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) argued that “Black Lives Matter” is a poor message because it makes white people feel less valued.

After former South Carolina Rep. Bakari Sellers (D) explained that as a black man, he was “the only person at this table whose next interaction [with law enforcement] may cause them to be a hashtag,” Cuccinelli suggested that the “Black Lives Matter” slogan and hashtag should be amended, according to CNN footage shared by Raw Story.

“Adding t-o-o at the end puts it in a context that makes sense,” he argued. Sellers answered that message is already implicit in the slogan.

“Well, you may say that,” Cuccinelli told Sellers. “And there’s plenty of reason to understand that. But I don’t think every American hears it that way. They hear, ‘Here we are. Yes, we have this political motivation that we’re separating out this one category of Americans and saying they matter more than everybody else.'”

Once again the Democrats fold and run…

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid on Tuesday declared politically dead the effort to ban military-style assault weapons, a setback for President Obama and gun-control advocates who are pushing the Senate to move quickly on bills to limit gun violence.

Reid (D-Nev.) is preparing to move ahead with debate on a series of gun-control proposals when the Senate returns from a two-week Easter recess in early April. Although he has vowed to hold votes on measures introduced after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., in December, Reid told reporters Tuesday that the proposed assault-weapons ban isn’t holding up against Senate rules that require at least 60 votes to end debate and move to final passage.

The proposed ban, “using the most optimistic numbers, has less than 40 votes. That’s not 60,” Reid said.

Still up for consideration are three other bills approved last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee: bipartisan legislation to make gun trafficking a federal crime, a bipartisan measure to expand a Justice Department grant program that provides funding for school security, and a Democratic proposal to expand the nation’s gun background check program.

Step right on up, Harry – and get your “Yellowback Donkey Award” for legislative cowardice.

North Carolina was one of 26 states which involuntarily sterilized women. Most of those women were black and poor.

Like the Tuskegee Experiments, this one stands out as the medical establishment failing. When you hear the Tea Baggers of today talking about “welfare irresponsibility” – this is inevitably where that leads.

Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.

“I have to carry these scars with me. I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.

Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”

Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”

“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina. They took something from me both times,” she said. “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”

It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York where she was living at the time told her that she’d been sterilized.

“Butchered. The doctor used that word… I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.

North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.

Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. To eliminate those society ills and improve society’s gene pool, proponents of the theory argued that those that exhibited the traits should be sterilized. Some of America’s wealthiest businessmen of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of Proctor and Gamble and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.

It began as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women and men, but over time, North Carolina shifted focus, targeting more women and more blacks than whites. A third of the sterilizations performed in North Carolina were done on girls under the age of 18. Some were as young as nine years old…

Earlier this week Drugbo took Obama to task for sending 100 US Advisors to Uganda to combat the Lords Resistance Army. Drugbo characterized the intervention as a “war”, and accused President Obama of killing “christians”. The LRA is not Christian – they are mass murderers, child rapists, and criminals. Here is Limbaugh defending them…

Racism will make you stupid.

Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord’s Resistance Army. And here we are at war with them. Have you ever heard of Lord’s Resistance Army, Dawn? How about you, Brian? Snerdley, have you? You never heard of Lord’s Resistance Army? Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. It means God. I was only kidding. Lord’s Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. That’s what the lingo means, “to help regional forces remove from the battlefield,” meaning capture or kill. […]

Lord’s Resistance Army objectives. I have them here. “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.” Now, again Lord’s Resistance Army is who Obama sent troops to help nations wipe out. The objectives of the Lord’s Resistance Army, what they’re trying to accomplish with their military action in these countries is the following: “To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.” Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield.

Senator Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) sets (a small part of) the record straight on the “Lords Resistance Army”…

Appears to be a rising call that the US step in and do something about the raging Civil War in Libya…

Seems to me to be about the dumbest thing the US could ever do is intervene in any way in another Middle Eastern disaster – virtually guaranteeing another Afghanistan 3-5 way war, with about the only thing the other parties agreeing to…

Is shooting at Americans.

Worse, the Bushit already sold the US Military and economy down the river lying the country into one “misadventure” and failing to close out another.

So I’m sorry Libyan brothers – but the American coin machine is stuck on empty.

So when I see an editorial like this in the Christian Science Monitor – I sincerely hope it’s somebody else doing the “saving” for a change…

The gross atrocities committed by the Qaddafi regime against protesters in Libya are of a kind demanding outside intervention. The Arab revolt for democracy now also needs protection from war crimes.

Now instead of simply siding with Arabs or Iranians seeking freedom, the world must also try to deter cornered dictators from committing mass atrocities.

In Libya, Muammar Qaddafi reacted far more harshly than his counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt did to the popular Arab demands for liberty. He unleashed fighter jets and machine guns against his opponents.

It was an excessive use of violence leading to the kind of mass slaughter seen in 1975 Cambodia, 1989 China, 1994 Rwanda, 1995 Bosnia, 1999 Kosovo, and 2003 Darfur.

Several of Mr. Qaddafi’s own ambassadors quit in disgust, warning of genocide and triggering the United Nations Security Council to weigh taking action. And indeed, if the Arab revolt continues in many Middle East countries, the world must be prepared to prevent extreme violence. It should take a decisive stand now in the case of the extreme cruelty committed in Libya.

More than democracy is at stake. The world must also act against crimes against humanity. And words of condemnation are not enough.

In fact, outside military intervention could be necessary, as was the case in Kosovo and Bosnia by NATO forces. In 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed the idea of an international “responsibility to protect” innocent people from great harm within a sovereign country. That principle was elevated by the UN in large part because of its failure to intervene in the Rwanda genocide.

Failure to protect Libyan protesters, or any peaceful uprising in the Middle East, would only prove that the international community has yet to learn from past mistakes in not upholding international human rights laws, such as the Genocide Convention.

It is a difficult task for the UN or NATO to decide whether to break a state’s sovereignty if massacres are taking place. It’s even more difficult to find countries willing to make the sacrifice to send in their forces.

This regime, in power for more than four decades, has been the most despotic of Arab autocrats, ranking alongside North Korea in its human rights violations. Now it has shown its true colors, and Libyans by the thousands are asking for outside help.

If ever a “responsibility to protect” was made clear, it is now in Libya, where terror has been unleashed on its people.

Bob Barr, a former U.S. congressman, is advising Jean-Claude Duvalier as the Haitian ex-dictator seeks to unlock frozen funds left in Swiss banks after he fled to Paris exile amid a 1986 rebellion.

Duvalier “is very interested in trying to get those funds freed up, not for himself, but so they can be used to help the situation in Haiti,” Barr said by phone from Port-au-Prince yesterday. Barr, 62, was a Republican representative from Georgia in 1995-2003 and ran for president in 2008 on the Libertarian Party ticket.

Barr accompanied Duvalier Jan. 21 as the former dictator made his first public comments since his Jan. 16 return to his homeland from a 25-year exile. Also accompanying Duvalier were two other American lawyers, Ed Marger of Jasper, Georgia, and Mike Puglise of Snellville, Georgia, according to a statement issued by Barr’s office.

The 59-year-old Duvalier, also known as “Baby Doc,” apologized to victims of abuses during his government, vowed to help the quake-ravaged nation rebuild and said he expected to face “persecution” upon his return. Haitian authorities opened a corruption case against him two days after his return.

The former dictator said his desire to help Haiti rebuild from last year’s quake that killed more than 300,000 “far outweighs any harassment I could face,” according to a video of his speech posted on the website of the daily Nouvelliste.

A new Swiss law set to take effect Feb. 1 may allow authorities to return to Haiti as much as $7.3 million frozen in Duvalier’s accounts, said Jenny Piaget, a spokeswoman for the Swiss foreign affairs department.

Duvalier’s 15-year rule began in 1971 when his father, Francois Duvalier, known as “Papa Doc,” appointed him president for life. The Duvaliers oversaw the killings of 20,000 to 30,000 civilians, many at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes secret police, according to Human Rights Watch.

Amnesty International, which has pressed for Duvalier to be tried for crimes against humanity, said the corruption case is “a positive step, but it is not enough,” according to a Jan. 18 statement.

When asked about the crimes against humanity charges, Barr, who is advising Duvalier and not representing him as a lawyer, said “allegations are the cheapest commodity on the market.”

Sort of like the “allegations” against a sitting President…Which were the cheapest “commodity” of all?

For those of you who don’t catch the “Brass Ankle” reference... Although in this case, I pre-apologize to the folks in that group for the intimation that Barr could be part of it.